Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane

positions.
    The mountain ranges of the world, Wegener argued, had been created not by the cooling and wrinkling of the earth’s crust – a theory which had come back into vogue at the start of the twentieth century – but by the crash of one drifting continent into another, causing buckling around the impact zone. The low-lying Urals, for example, which nominally separated European Russia from Siberia, were, according to Wegener, the product of an ancient collision between two mobile continents which had occurred so long ago that the effects of mountain building in the impact zone had been largely flattened by erosion.
    For proof, said Wegener, just look at the globe. Look at the dispersal of the continents. Move them around a bit and they fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Slide South America towards Africa and its eastern coast locks into Africa’s western perimeter. Wrap Central America around the Ivory Coast, and North America over the top of Africa and you have half a supercontinent already. The same trick, he pointed out, worked for India’s angled western littoral, which fits snugly against the straight side of the Horn of Africa, just as Madagascar slots neatly back on to the divot on the south-eastern coast of Africa.
    Wegener had harder evidence to support his claim. He had spent years working in the extensive fossil archives of the University of Marburg, and had deduced that identical fossil specimens had been found in the rock record at precisely the zones Wegener suggested had once been united: on the west coast of Africa, for example, and the east coast of Brazil the coal deposits and fossils matched. ‘It is just as if we were to refit the torn pieces of a newspaper by matching their edges,’ he wrote, ‘and then check whether the lines of print ran smoothly across. If they do, there is nothing left but to conclude that the pieces were in fact joined in this way.’

    Reconstructions of the Map of the World for three periods according to Wegener’s displacement theory. From Alfred Wegener’s
The Origins of Continents and Oceans
, trans. J. A. Skerl, 3rd edn (London: Methuen & Co., 1924).
    Wegener was not the first to suggest the interconnectedness of the continents. The sixteenth-century cartographer Ortelius had noticed the jigsaw-puzzle composition of the continents, and had suggested that they were once attached, but had been sundered by drastic floods and earthquakes. He was disbelieved. The endlessly perceptive Francis Bacon mentioned in 1620 in his
Novum Organum
that the continents could fit together ‘as if cut from the same mould’, butseems to have thought no more about it. And in 1858, a French-American called Antonio Snider-Pelligrini devoted an entire treatise –
Creation and Its Mysteries Revealed
– to showing how the continents had once been united.
    But in the mid-nineteenth century there was simply no context for such a radical overhaul of geological theory; no other pieces of knowledge with which the theory itself could fit. A mainstay of nineteenth-century geology was a belief in the existence of enormous land-bridges which had at one point joined the world’s continents, but had since then crumbled into the oceans. These land-bridges explained the existence of the same species on different landmasses, and seemed far more plausible than mobile continents.
    In 1912, therefore, Wegener was arguing against the grain of prevailing wisdom: if his theory were correct, it would nullify many of the founding assumptions of nineteenth-century geology. Worse still, Wegener was an intruder, a trespasser on the turf of the geologists. For his main field of research was meteorology – he was a pioneer in weather-balloon study and a specialist in Greenland, where he led several successful, and one fatal, Arctic research expeditions. How could a weatherman presume to dismantle at a single stroke the complex and magnificent edifice of nineteenth-century geology?
    The opposition to Wegener’s